If you had no limits…

If you were unstoppable…

If you were smarter than the collective whole of humanity…

Yes, you.

I don't care if you flunked biology.

I want to know what your spark is.

I want to tease it out of you.

I want to know what YOU think the future should look like.

Is it an abundant future? Do people prosper and live in harmony?

Is it a dystopia? Are people suffering and living in fear, more than they already are now?

Are kids growing up safe? Are hurt people still hurting people?

Or did you stop the cycle?

Did you…take action? Figure out what you wanted to contribute to the world, and act on it?

Alone, an individual has no power.

Only when we join forces can we affect change on a massive scale.

Never has anyone achieved anything of note without the participation, and at least passive consent of others somewhere along the way.

Stop being a tragic hero.

The world needs your gifts too badly to play small or stay isolated.

The world needs you to win.

If we all stepped up and joined forces we would have a “neotopia” tomorrow.

You are a key and integral part of the puzzle.

You are the one who can pick up the ball and run it into the end zone, but not without blockers, tacklers, linebackers, linemen, wide receivers…

You get the idea.

You just need to find your team.

And protect your own. Create emotional juice. Energy, whatever you want to call it.

That's the stuff that will lead your team to victory.

Practice creating it daily.

First in yourself, and then in others.

Make it a habit. Work that muscle until it hurts, and force it to grow.

You'll need every ounce of it for the journey ahead.

Because there be dragons along this path we're walking.

As you learn to lead yourself, others will start to take notice and turn to you to be led.

Here's what happens as you start to lead more and more…

After a while, you've led so many that you start to see all the patterns in their behavior.

You start to understand and anticipate their needs.

You see how to best serve and support them.

And in doing so, they can become aligned with your mission in the world.

They begin to see success in your engine, and the impact you can have is exponentially increased.

Your influence begins to rise as you spend less of your own time, energy, and attention but somehow continue to influence more.

Your income begins to go up, as your time is now more valuable.

You begin to create more products and services.

You create systems, value chains by which every part of a customer/client life cycle is figured out, perfected, and turned into a process.

A video, a workflow, and a checklist (which is always open whether a task has been performed 1,000 times or once) assures quality control, accountability, and that the value chain remains unbroken.

These should be so simple to follow that they become a playbook for your entire business.

You continue to eliminate, automate, delegate, and liberate yourself from the equation, so you can focus on bigger and bigger impact.

You reward others for their contribution and teach, mentor, and show them the light along the way.

They see the impact that THEY have on others, which builds the confidence and the evidence that they can continue to do the same.

Your values continue to be refined and better defined. Your values and beliefs create your standards, your thoughts, words, actions, habits, and ultimately your destiny, throughout this process.

This is true not only of every individual, but everyone in an organization as well.

So leadership evolves from just managing the flow to eventually setting a bigger and bigger vision.

Getting it crystal clear so everyone in the company or even those involved can see it, understand it, find a way to sink their teeth into it.

You cultivate inspiration, incentive, and impact that gives the work the organization does meaning.

You consistently find ways to serve more people and create abundant and profitable exchange for everyone you serve, including yourself and your team.

And that is the way magic happens, folks.

But it all starts with you.

Before we dig into this, we must first ask, what is a business?

Think of every single business as a machine that brings value to people in exchange for value.

All businesses exist to serve people.

LEADS: Without people who are qualified, and interested in your product or service, you have no leads, and therefore no customers/clients.

SALES: Without a process by which to help those people make the best decision for them to make an abundant exchange happen, there is no money, no value for value.

VALUE: A profitable, abundant exchange is where both parties come away with more value perceived than what they gave for that value. When someone pays for something where they don't get enough or get no value, and the intent was to not provide, it's a scam.

(Caveat: It DOES take two to tango, as a customer/client you have to actually DO or USE the product or service you bought to get the value.)

OPERATIONS: Finally the process by which all of this is tracked, organized, managed and delivered at scale and with little effort on the part of the provider is called operations. Without operations, you have no idea what's working and what isn't, and you're on your way to a disaster.

So, what do you offer?

What you have mastered, or seems like common sense, is NOT common to everyone.

Your unconscious competence might be their biggest pain in life.

What you have created, tinkered with, perfected, systematized, and scaled takes little ongoing energy to fulfill, but can add massive value to more people.

I've been an entrepreneur since age 12, when one day, there wasn't enough money to fix our lawnmower.

You see, my dad was injured since I was two, and my mom had to leave to find work.

So I did all the dishes, took out the trash, mowed the lawn, whatever needed doing.

One day, I went to my neighbor, asked to borrow his mower, and had an idea.

“Hey, will you pay me $20 to mow your lawn?”

He said yes!

I didn't have a plan. I wasn't trying to start a business.

But pretty soon, I had a way to earn extra money that my family desperately needed.

Every action is perfect in its imperfection.

You never fail; you only win or learn.

The only way you can truly fail is to quit or, in other words, stop taking action.

Since then, I've had many, many jobs and started many, many businesses.

Many did not work out, or they worked out for a while.

Some were a smashing success!

I want to help you learn, grow, serve, lead and win faster.

I'm here to help you learn from my mistakes and model my successes.

So you don't have to struggle like I did.

The following are key cogs in the wheel of your business:

Leads, Sales, Value, Operations

Ideas, People, Timing, Numbers

What, Who, When, How, Why

Result, Purpose, Massive Action

I’ll expand on this next time and dive into the dirt of what a business is.

Because you can't build something that you don't understand.

Guess what?

I don't have all the answers.

Sometimes, I do know better, and I still make the mistake.

That's because I'm human, and so are you

As humans, we're going to screw up sometimes. It's inevitable.

The ones that are most successful learn from their mistakes and don't continue to do the same old stuff that just doesn't produce the outcomes and results that they want.

That's why this simple, five-step formula, borrowed from the lovely folks at Tony Robbins, works in every single situation.

1. Know what you want
2. Know why you want it
3. Take MASSIVE action
4. Know what you are getting
5. Change your approach
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until you get what you want

It seems simple, and maybe even a little too on the nose.

But guess what?

Complexity is the enemy of execution.

Simple is great.

We love simple because simple works.

It also creates less anxiety.

I would rather have the simple plan properly executed than the complicated one not even started or completely mismanaged.

So many more things can go wrong with a complicated strategy versus a simple one.

Fail to heed this warning at your own risk.

Taryn Southern is a digital storyteller whose videos have received more than 500 million views across YouTube. Founder of digital production + consulting company Happy Cat Media, Taryn has advised dozens of companies on digital strategies, influencer campaigns, and produced more than 1,500 videos for companies like Snapchat, Marriott, Maker Studios, Today Show, ATTN, and more.

Passionate about the intersection of science, tech, and storytelling, she is currently producing a documentary on the future of the human brain and the first album composed with artificial intelligence, I AM AI, to be released in early 2018. As an avid blockchain enthusiast, Taryn recently launched the world’s first tokenized song that enables large numbers of people to collaborate and share in royalties using Ethereum smart contracts and Ladies of Crypto, a cryptocurrency community for women.

Listen in to learn more!

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